A Cross and a Star: Memoirs of a Jewish Girl in Chile (The Helen Rose Scheuer Jewish Women's Series)

Rating:
Summary: The Independent Reviews Site ...
Review: Poets seem to have a knack with memoir. There's alreadysomething very baring about much contemporary poetry that is similarto what many memorably brave and direct memoirs possess. There's also something even more immediate about translation. Works translatedinto English often have a stunning directness, which can owe itself tothe difficulty of effectively bringing the idioms and cadence ofanother language into our own. These tendencies, like any elements ofwriting, can be effective and they can also be overused. InMarjorieAgosin's A CROSS AND A STAR: MEMOIRS OF A JEWISH GIRL INCHILIE, they are both. Luckily, the effectiveness of the writing outweighs the repetitiveness of certain phrases and elements. The brevity of the book, 179 pages which include 30 pages of photographs, serves it well. Agosin is writing in the voice of her mother, so the book becomes a sort of autobiography by association, and as such the stories are simple and powerful. If the book had been any longer, the simplicity of its thematic basis, and the overly-direct style of the translated prose, would have begun working against it. As it is, the collection effectively evokes the beauty and wonder of Chile, the destructive power of hatred in the lives of one family, and the power of people who choose to help, rather than hurt, each other. The tales in the collection span decades, and many have survived only due to oral storytelling traditions by which Agosin's predecessors maintained their connections with each other even in the face of the overwhelming tragedies of the Holocaust. Most evocative are thestories dealing with specifics of lives torn apart by having to leaveeverything behind in order to avoid being taken to concentrationcamps; the details of these stories, the choices made by theseindividuals, are compelling. Agosin's accounts, too, of the mixture ofbeauty, fear, peace and isolation that came from living at thesouthern tip of the world amidst Nazis and natives is fascinating. Theonly places where the narrative falters is in the repetition ofaccounts of verbal abuse which the Agosin's mother endured. Thereare only so many times you can be told that she was called "dirtyJew" or "Christ killer" before those moments have lost their power amid the lush prose and captivating details. One of the most striking aspects of the memoir is the way in which it seems to flow back and forth between pure realism and a kind of "Magic Realism." This is in keeping with the events of the book, taking place at the bottom of the world, as well as the ways in which people can alter their perceptions of reality to deal with incredible adversity. Since the narrator is recalling childhood for the bulk of the book, simple desires are often stated with great grandeur, such as Agosin's mother's wish for the beauty and safety of a Catholic guardian angel. Much of the narrative's power comes from the unaffected wants and needs of a girl growing-up surrounded by a mixture of overwhelming hatred and beauty, societal spurning and familial love. It is a mixture that works well. This book is an effective, and highly readable collection of survival tales that sing of natural beauty and spiritual strength, of the wonder of children and the resolve of adults, and of the incredible value of memory and language.